Read Online In the Bonesetter's Waiting Room by Aarathi Prasad - Free Book Online

went on to say, success has brought its own problems for the industry. ‘Because of this there are also now a lot of quacks coming up who are not trained in surgery at all … so insurance premiums and claims are both rising. Regulation is almost absent. We do have a consumer court and a civil court – and technically anyone can go there and complain, but really we need advisory medical bodies and councils to review this.’
    Worryingly, an estimated fifty-five per cent of rhinoplasties conducted by reputable Indian plastic surgeons are repairs to those that have gone wrong in the first instance, having been carried out in unregulated, often illegally operated small-town clinics by unqualified practitioners. A 2011 Times of India investigation found that patients were often discharged within a few hours of being operated upon. Without regulation, competitive pricing means that, for many patients, the sole determining factor in where they choose to be operated on is cost.
    For patients who do pick the wrong surgeon, the consequences can be severe, even fatal. A famous Tollywood (Telugu) actress, Aarthi Agarwal, who was refused liposuction by her Hyderabad surgeon went ahead with the procedure in America. She died, aged thirty-one, of respiratory problems soon after. Aarthi’s Indian surgeon had turned her down because she had very little fat under the skin – which is what liposuction is supposed to deal with. The procedure is not appropriate either for removing large amounts of body fat or for treating the ‘skinny-fat’ phenomenon: the sort of mid-waist fat that is internal, wrapped around the organs, and common in Indians, stemming from either genetics or the pre-natal environment. Add to that the change in many Indians’ diets to high-calorie foods, an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and the decline of the perception that big is beautiful and it becomes clear that the demand for liposuction will probably escalate further still.
    In the absence of regulation, Dr Arolkar believes the onus has to be on would-be patients to assess their doctor’s credentials before going under the knife. ‘They also need to be aware of complications,’ Dr Arolkar told me. ‘But either way the risks of dissatisfaction are high, because now some people don’t really know what they want. They say they want to become more beautiful, but they don’t know what they want to change! Sometimes I think, actually, you need a brain change, because I’ve seen people who were asking the impossible.’
    I was intrigued that what people are asking for were clearly expensive procedures. In Mumbai, a tummy tuck will set you back more than Rs200,000 – around £2,000. This is ten times cheaper than the United States in absolute terms (though when adjusted for the cost of living the affordability to someone earning an average middle-class Indian salary is probably similar). There’d be a similar price tag on breast augmentation, while a nose job starts at Rs100,000. Why were people willing to spend so much on procedures that, as Dr Arolkar said, would until recently have been seen as entirely unnecessary?
    â€˜The thing is, people are becoming more aware of their exterior and showing more of their body, so blemishes get amplified,’ Dr Arolkar told me. ‘I’ve had some very strange requests – like one lady asked me to move a mole to another part of her body. Another time, a girl came to me and asked if I could get rid of the smallpox vaccination scar from her upper arm. Then a boy came to me with slightly floppy ears. He was twenty-three. They really weren’t all that bad so I told him to go away. He wouldn’t, so I asked him for three times as much as it should cost, just to put him off. He turned up the next day with the money. He had sold the motorbike his father had given him.’
    â€˜Do you understand why he was so desperate?’ I asked.
    â€˜Peer